In policy fields such as public health, policing, and pollution abatement, evaluation of the effectiveness of programmes and policies is commonplace: What are the goals sought? What means have been tried to achieve them? Which alternatives prove to be the most cost-effective in pursuit of goals? But evaluation of programmes in the cultural and creative industries is presently much less extensive than in these other areas of policy. In part, this might be the result of long-standing lack of clarity on the goals of cultural policy. It is still not entirely clear that arts councils or cabinet offices dedicated to digital culture and media “know what they are doing” in this respect.
We would say this is particularly so in the United States, where a smaller proportion of academic research is devoted to cultural policy and the creative industries (defined as the sector encompassing individual creativity, in all its variety, and the firms and institutions that facilitate the marketing and dissemination of this creativity) than we find in the United Kingdom and in the rest of Europe. In the US, the precarity of direct public and philanthropic support of the arts particularly tends to foster research that supports “advocacy” for the arts in its instrumental economic and social benefits rather than more rigorous evaluation and criticism.
“Creative industries” have become a key sector of policymaking in many countries, even though it is by nature a sector containing within it divergent subsectors. As Campbell, O’Brien, and Taylor (Citation2019) note in their valuable summary of sociological approaches to the creative industries sector, we are to some degree still dealing with fluidity in terms of which boundaries are most relevant. For example, parts of the sector focused on bringing individual creative arts activity to market and to consumers – broadcasting, for example – tend to have a lot of similarities in the character of its workforce with the traditionally defined “arts sector”, while in parts of the sector with a heavy information technology focus that is less the case. The papers in this special issue do not attempt to resolve these boundary issues, nor does any one paper deal with the creative industries sector as a whole in its broadest definition. Instead, the papers look at a range of issues from within parts of the creative industries, such as media literacy, diversity and inclusion in employment, efforts to boost arts engagement in schools and in colleges and the impact of “creative scenes” on neighbourhoods.
In May 2019, The O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University launched its Center for Cultural Affairs, whose mission is to facilitate a network of scholars and practitioners interested in advancing cultural affairs research, produce high-quality and relevant research on arts and cultural policy and management issues, and serve as a resource to the arts and cultural sector.
The five papers in this special issue of Cultural Trends on Policy and Program Evaluation in the Creative Industries were first presented at a workshop coinciding with the opening celebration of the Center for Cultural Affairs and serve to show in concrete form the goals of the Center, bringing together diverse scholars to present, discuss, critique and, ultimately, disseminate widely research of value to the academic and the practitioner communities. Although the call for papers was global, the five papers chosen that best fit the goals of the symposium all happened to be from researchers based in the United States: this was not by design, but hopefully will have a knock-on effect of spurring more creative industries evaluation from the United States, including in this journal.
The papers cover a wide range of topics across various facets of the creative industries. Margaret McGladrey, Madeline Oliff and Emma Draper evaluate The Girl Project, a feminist artist-activist programme for teenaged girls in Versailles, Kentucky. They find that this participatory programme has value in taking students beyond what have become the norms in “media literacy” education of simply critiquing commercial media and its images of gender. Jessica Sherrod Hale and Joanna Woronkowicz look at the effects on student arts participation resulting from a university’s significant increase in cultural programming. Their result extends beyond the college campus: efforts to increase offerings do increase participation, but it is amongst those who already have a significant interest in the arts. It remains how to reach those who have shown little interest in the past. Daniel Bowen and Brian Kisida investigate satisfaction with partnerships between community arts organizations and the public schools of Houston, Texas, that serve a racially and ethically diverse, and predominantly economically disadvantaged, group of students. An interesting innovation in this paper is its examination of participating arts organizations’ responses, and not just the (positive) student outcomes. In general, small arts organizations felt they had more to gain in outreach, and exposure, than larger, more established arts presenters. Brea Heidelberg evaluates a funded programme aimed at increasing diversity and improving inclusion for underrepresented groups in internships at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her particular focus, and a finding that is valuable across the creative industries, is that good intentions regarding attracting underrepresented groups into entry-level internships and jobs are not going to produce long-term change in the face of an organizational structure that hampers coordinated change, and a lack of knowledge and understanding among existing employees. And Yasemin Arikan, Terry Nichols Clark, Douglas Noonan and George Tolley consider whether investments in neighbourhood “scenes” promote economic growth. They find that it is important to disaggregate types of cultural activity, separating traditional arts venues from firms more associated with a Bohemian hipness. The former tend to be associated with higher income neighbourhoods but, all else being equal, the Bohemian scene, as per its original conception, is more associated with lower income neighbourhoods.
Note that all papers included here were, following the workshop, subject to the same peer-review process as all original articles in Cultural Trends, and we are thankful to the reviewers who contributed to this group of papers. Space considerations meant that the editors had to insist on author’s keeping the final versions of their papers as concise as possible, and the editors are grateful to the authors who sometimes had to make difficult choices in terms of what to keep in and what to leave out of their substantial amount of findings.